The Best American Humorous Short Stories

Best American Humorous Short
Stories, by Various

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Title: The Best American Humorous Short Stories
Author: Various
Release Date: February 5, 2004 [EBook #10947]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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THE BEST AMERICAN HUMOROUS SHORT STORIES
Edited by ALEXANDER JESSUP, Editor of "Representative American
Short Stories," "The Book of the Short Story," the "Little French
Masterpieces" Series, etc.

INTRODUCTION
This volume does not aim to contain all "the best American humorous
short stories"; there are many other stories equally as good, I suppose,
in much the same vein, scattered through the range of American
literature. I have tried to keep a certain unity of aim and impression in
selecting these stories. In the first place I determined that the pieces of
brief fiction which I included must first of all be not merely good
stories, but good short stories. I put myself in the position of one who
was about to select the best short stories in the whole range of
American literature,[1] but who, just before he started to do this, was
notified that he must refrain from selecting any of the best American
short stories that did not contain the element of humor to a marked
degree. But I have kept in mind the wide boundaries of the term humor,
and also the fact that the humorous standard should be kept
second--although a close second--to the short story standard.
In view of the necessary limitations as to the volume's size, I could not
hope to represent all periods of American literature adequately, nor was
this necessary in order to give examples of the best that has been done
in the short story in a humorous vein in American literature. Probably
all types of the short story of humor are included here, at any rate. Not
only copyright restrictions but in a measure my own opinion have
combined to exclude anything by Joel Chandler Harris--Uncle
Remus--from the collection. Harris is primarily--in his best work--a
humorist, and only secondarily a short story writer. As a humorist he is
of the first rank; as a writer of short stories his place is hardly so high.
His humor is not mere funniness and diversion; he is a humorist in the
fundamental and large sense, as are Cervantes, Rabelais, and Mark
Twain.
No book is duller than a book of jokes, for what is refreshing in small
doses becomes nauseating when perused in large assignments. Humor
in literature is at its best not when served merely by itself but when
presented along with other ingredients of literary force in order to give
a wide representation of life. Therefore "professional literary
humorists," as they may be called, have not been much considered in

making up this collection. In the history of American humor there are
three names which stand out more prominently than all others before
Mark Twain, who, however, also belongs to a wider classification:
"Josh Billings" (Henry Wheeler Shaw, 1815-1885), "Petroleum V.
Nasby" (David Ross Locke, 1833-1888), and "Artemus Ward" (Charles
Farrar Browne, 1834-1867). In the history of American humor these
names rank high; in the field of American literature and the American
short story they do not rank so high. I have found nothing of theirs that
was first-class both as humor and as short story. Perhaps just below
these three should be mentioned George Horatio Derby (1823-1861),
author of Phoenixiana (1855) and the Squibob Papers (1859), who
wrote under the name "John Phoenix." As has been justly said, "Derby,
Shaw, Locke and Browne carried to an extreme numerous tricks
already invented by earlier American humorists, particularly the tricks
of gigantic exaggeration and calm-faced mendacity, but they are plainly
in the main channel of American humor, which had its origin in the
first comments of settlers upon the conditions of the frontier, long drew
its principal inspiration from the differences between that frontier and
the more settled and compact regions of the country, and reached its
highest development in Mark Twain, in his youth a child of the
American frontier, admirer and imitator of Derby and Browne, and
eventually a man of the world and one of its greatest humorists."[2]
Nor have such later writers who were essentially humorists as "Bill
Nye" (Edgar Wilson Nye, 1850-1896) been considered, because their
work does not attain the literary standard and the short story standard as
creditably as it does the